Web Architecture, Web Production, Web Marketing

Twitter is useful as either a conversation you have among friends to share common experiences OR a professional conversation where you only talk about one thing.

I’ve been squatting on my personal twitter account for almost 3 years now.  I finally hooked up a client to alert me to tweets in real time.  After hooking that up, I promptly dropped a whole pile of professional acocunts I had been following for products or services I was interested in.  I dropped them because Twitterrific would keep popping up with some company saying stuff like “Good morning Twitterverse”.  Are you kidding me?  How annoying.  I assume these companies think they need to keep talking to keep their name in my face.  Well, there isn’t a single company I kept following that does stuff like this.  I don’t care how much I liked your product or service.

Don’t mix professional and personal tweets in your professional twitter account.

People who follow you professionally will end up dropping you if you throw too much fluff in there.

I’m guilty of getting too technical in my personal account.  I’ve tweeted when the fedex and ups api’s have been down.  I’m confident that 99% of the 30 people following my personal account don’t care about that.

So I’m going to stick to things on my personal account that may be of some interest to family and friends.  Any professional stuff needs to go elsewhere.

Personally I’ve started a twitter list for professional food related stuff in the Chicago area.  I’ve picked out mostly local folks who stick to talking about food almost all the time.  It’s something I’m passionate about and am excited to keep tabs on.  There’s some cool organizations and chefs which I’m not including in the list though because they’re mixing way too much personal in with the professional.  If half of my list is inside jokes and talk about what tv show they’re looking forward to, the list would get real boring, real quick.

I hope more and more professionals can catch on.  There’s some professional conversations I’m really interested in but don’t have the desire to put up with the noise that follows them.

ColdFusion will purge your client sessions for you on a schedule.  This schedule is dependent on when the CF engine starts.  If your purge schedule is OK now, a CF reboot will set a new schedule and cause problems.  if you use a database and your client variables table has hundred of thousands or millions of records, this can really kill performance.

I have disabled purge of client sessions in the CF Admin and do my purge during low load hours using a separate schedule.

I run 4 queries in a bash script.  You can write a CF script to run these in windows or any other scripting language that let’s you connect to your client variable database.

Here’s the MySQL versions of the queries:

delete from CDATA where CFID in (select CFID from CGLOBAL where CGLOBAL.lvisit < date_sub(now(), interval 60 day));

delete from CGLOBAL where lvisit < date_sub(now(), interval 60 day);

optimize table CDATA;

optimize table CGLOBAL;

Optimizing your tables after the purge will clean up the empty space in your db file left now that those records are gone.  This is helpful if you delete thousands of records at a time.

When insuring W3C validation on a website lately, I saw that the tfoot tag must come before the tbody tag.  From the W3C spec: “TFOOT must appear before TBODY within a TABLE definition so that user agents can render the foot before receiving all of the (potentially numerous) rows of data.”  That makes sense but it’s benefit just clicked today.  The foot should function as the summary of the table data and thus let the user agent decide if it cares about the body.  Screen readers make obvious benefit of this.  I can see how search enignes would appreciate useful tfoot summaries as well as mobile applications.

I wanted to get a quick count of messages being sent to and from all my domains in plesk.   I wrote this script to get the mail domains from the plesk database.  Then I loop through them and grep a regex against the maillog file.  Since I’m actually using zgrep to look decompress yesterday’s maillog file at the same time I get the counts, it’s a little processor intensive.  It takes about 10 seconds to run through 30 domains in a 5 meg gzipped file.  If I were to gunzip the file first and just grep it, this would go much quicker.  But I’m fine with a 10 second run time and the bonus of not having to trash a decompressed maillog file when I’m done.

Here’s the bash script I’ve saved as mailcount.sh:

#!/bin/sh

MYSQLPASS=`cat /etc/psa/.psa.shadow`

for DOMAIN in `mysql -uadmin -p$MYSQLPASS -e "select distinct domains.name from mail inner join domains on mail.dom_id=domains.id" -B -N psa`

do
echo $DOMAIN `zgrep -c -E "(to|from)=.+@$DOMAIN" /usr/local/psa/var/log/maillog.processed.1.gz`
done

Here’s a version that copies and gunzip’s the maillog before doing any processing.

#!/bin/sh

MYSQLPASS=`cat /etc/psa/.psa.shadow`

# copy the log file before decompress
cp /usr/local/psa/var/log/maillog.processed.1.gz /usr/local/psa/var/log/maillog.processed.1-working.gz &&

# decompress the log working file
gunzip /usr/local/psa/var/log/maillog.processed.1-working.gz

for DOMAIN in `mysql -uadmin -p$MYSQLPASS -e "select distinct domains.name from mail inner join domains on mail.dom_id=domains.id" -B -N psa`
do
echo $DOMAIN `grep -c -E "(to|from)=.+@$DOMAIN" /usr/local/psa/var/log/maillog.processed.1-working`
done

# remove the working log file
rm -f /usr/local/psa/var/log/maillog.processed.1-working &&
echo "file removed"
exit;

Search Engines are often blind to the content of video or audio files but this is starting to change. The new google audio indexing service uses speech recognition to turn audio into text and then indexes that text. The ability for a computer to understand what an audio file means has far reaching implications. This is something to think about for the future but is not anything to build your whole marketing message on. The google audio indexing service is helped by clear pronunciation of words and low background noise. This technology allows for identifying sounds to assign to known words.  As for the visual portion of the video, we do not have a clear definitions of all the movements that could occur.  It is not possible at this time to pull accurate information from potentially complex visual movements.

I posted some tips on making websites for search engines at the office.

I’m having a heck of a time using pdf document variables in CF 8.0.1 on Mac OS X 10.5 and Redhat Linux ES 5.  Those are the only platforms I have to test cf with so perhaps this is a windows issue as well.

From Adobe’s IsPDFObject documentation, I’ve taken their example of reading in a file as a pdf object and writing it out.  I’ve even gone the extra step of making sure cf thinks the input file is a valid pdf.


<cfif IsPDFFile("filein.pdf")>
<cfpdf source="filein.pdf" action="read" name="myPDFform"/>
<cfif IsPDFObject(myPDFform)>
<cfpdf source=#myPDFform# action="write" destination = "fileout.pdf">
<cfelse>
<p>This is not a PDF.</p>
</cfif>
</cfif>


CF thinks the file is a pdf, it reads the file, it thinks the pdf document variable is valid, then when it tries to write, I get an error:


The file or directory (/Library/WebServer/Documents/coldfusion.pdf.PDFDocWrapper@1547134d) specified in the source attribute in the CFPDF tag does not exist.

The error occurred in /Library/WebServer/Documents/test.cfm: line 4

2 : <cfpdf source="filein.pdf" action="read" name="myPDFform"/>
3 : <cfif IsPDFObject(myPDFform)>
4 : <cfpdf source=#myPDFform# action="write" destination = "fileout.pdf">
5 : <cfelse>
6 : <p>This is not a PDF.</p>

Given where CF seems to be generating a temp file I could see this being a problem on my Linux box where cf can’t write to the webroot.  That would not be a problem on my local dev environment though where I can write to the webroot.  On both machines I can successfully access pdf files themselves and write to different files to add watermarks, get and set info, etc.  I just cannot work with the pdf document variable at all.  The last pdf file I tested with here was the CF 8.0.1 release notes from Adobe at around 250k.

When I get a solution to this issue, I’ll post it.  If anyone has any thoughts here I’m all ears.  Hopefully someone can point out that I’m doing something stupid and share a correction.  Otherwise I’ll submit a bug to Adobe.

A canned website doesn’t have to be horrible

I’m putting together some new marketing websites and need to come up with a design.  I can either pay a designer or find a premade template.  In past years, website templates have looked very unprofessional.  I started looking around at the current state of website templates and am impressed with the stylish xhtml/css options at Template World.  They offer some solid free selections, I’m going ahead with the $50 bucks for the members section since the templates are so good.

Adding some spices

With any of the templates I pick here, I’m going to take a little time to tweek things.  Template World doesn’t take the same approach as other template sites.  They offer a relatively small number of higher end templates rather than countless thousands of low end templates like the other guys.  So I’m not going to be able to find a template that has everything where I want it but with a little css work and some istock photo shopping I’m get something really slick.

I’m finally getting around to cleaning out dreamweaver LCK files from a large website. We have one developer that uses dreamweaver so these files are useless. So we’ve got these LCK files all over the place in this site. I’m just sick of looking at them.

Enter a shell one liner …

find . -name '*.LCK' -type f -print0 | xargs -0 /bin/rm -f

That command recursively looks in and under the directory I’m in for any files with the LCK extension and removes them.

Here’s a shell script you can save that will prompt you for an extension name to remove.

#!/bin/sh

echo "Enter Extension"
read filepattern
echo "Files matching *.$filepattern will be removed."
echo "Is this correct? y|n"
read confirmation

if  [ $confirmation = y ]; then
	find $PWD -name "*.$filepattern" -type f -print0 | xargs -0 /bin/rm -f
else
	echo "quitting"
	exit;
fi

Or if you don’t want any confirmation of the file extensions you’re about to delete.

#!/bin/sh

echo "Enter Extension"
read filepattern
find $PWD -name "*.$filepattern" -type f -print0 | xargs -0 /bin/rm -f

I’m new to Flex but still enjoyed the Mate framework presentation from Laura at asfusion.com.  I know that I need to think ahead of time how I’m going to organize all the events in my application.   This could simply be a design pattern.  The Mate framework has the idea of an Event Map to organize events in a central location.  Larger applications with multiple function sets can have multiple event maps.  I like how Mate and the Event Maps are organized.  I don’t feel like there would be much of an additional learning curve to start using Mate.  It looks pretty lightweight too.

If you’re looking into Flex, Mate is worth a look.  The site is well organized and has solid documentation so far.  This alpha version of Mate has well written, clear documentation and an api reference.  The documentation for users of many frameworks and apps is clearly an afterthought.  I really appreciate the Mate team spending time on their docs.  Additionally, I’ve enjoyed hacking up the FlickrBook example app to get a good idea for what’s going on with Mate.

cfvideo scenes

I think the idea of a cfvideo tag would be a solid feature for the future. In particular I’ve wanted to be able to pull off something with streaming video like is done on ted.com. The overlay at the bottom of each video that shows scene markings is very useful. It would be nice if as a developer or content producer if all I needed for navigation within a video were timecodes and optional chapter/scene titles.

cfvideo subtitles

I have a use right now for being able to programatically add subtitle overlays to video files. The anatomyofchristianity.org wordpress blog I developed has flash videos that I would like to integrate Bible references into at specific times. I already need to make a list of the timecodes and references. If I could just take that list and feed it into a script, that would save me tons of time of using Final Cut for busy work.

cfvideo tag for lazy amateur editors

Storage is cheap, bandwidth is cheap, cameras are cheap. By the time CF9 is released, the cost of storage, bandwidth and cameras will open up working with video to a huge market. Video files will only get bigger and more irrelevant. Something like the iMovie 08 takes a step at making simple editing for lazy amateur editors but that’s still too much for some people. Being able to have a cfvideo tag that could make cuts, even if they were non destructive for performance enhancement could go a long way in making some cool webapps.

cfvideo transcoding with user specified tools

I don’t think adobe would be able to provide a solid transcoding product without getting into a nightmare of licensing issues. Maybe I’m wrong. It would be nice to just specific some arguments and point cfvideo to ffmpeg for example.